<
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/04/dangerous-nonsense-ai-authored-books-about-adhd-for-sale-on-amazon>
"Amazon is selling books marketed at people seeking techniques to manage their
ADHD that claim to offer expert advice yet appear to be authored by a chatbot
such as ChatGPT.
Amazon’s marketplace has been deluged with works produced by artificial
intelligence that are easy and cheap to publish but include unhelpful or
dangerous misinformation, such as shoddy travel guidebooks and mushroom
foraging books that encourage risky tasting.
A number of books have appeared on the online retailer’s site offering guides
to ADHD that also seem to be written by chatbots. The titles include
Navigating ADHD in Men: Thriving with a Late Diagnosis,
Men with Adult ADHD:
Highly Effective Techniques for Mastering Focus,
Time Management and
Overcoming Anxiety and
Men with Adult ADHD Diet & Fitness.
Samples from eight books were examined for the
Guardian by Originality.ai, a
US company that detects content produced by artificial intelligence. The
company said each had a rating of 100% on its AI detection score, meaning its
systems were highly confident that the books were written by a chatbot.
Experts said online marketplaces were a “wild west” owing to the lack of
regulation around AI-produced work – and dangerous misinformation risked
spreading as a result.
Michael Cook, a computer science researcher at King’s College London, said
generative AI systems were known to give dangerous advice, for example around
ingesting toxic substances, mixing together dangerous chemicals or ignoring
health guidelines.
As such, it was “frustrating and depressing to see AI-authored books
increasingly popping up on digital marketplaces” particularly on health and
medical topics, which could result in misdiagnosis or worsen conditions, he
said.
“Generative AI systems like ChatGPT may have been trained on a lot of medical
textbooks and articles, but they’ve also been trained on pseudoscience,
conspiracy theories and fiction,” said Cook.
“They also can’t be relied on to critically analyse or reliably reproduce the
knowledge they’ve previously read – it’s not as simple as having the AI
‘remember’ things that they’ve seen in their training data. Generative AI
systems should not be allowed to deal with sensitive or dangerous topics
without the oversight of an expert,” he added.
Yet Cook noted Amazon’s business model incentivised this type of practice, as
it made “money every time” people bought a book, whether the work was
“trustworthy or not”, while the generative AI companies that created the
products were not held accountable.
Prof Shannon Vallor, the director of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for
Technomoral Futures, said Amazon had “an ethical responsibility to not
knowingly facilitate harm to their customers and to society”, although it would
be “absurd” to make a bookseller responsible for the contents of all its books.
Problems were arising because the guardrails previously deployed in the
publishing industry – such as reputational concerns and the vetting of authors
and manuscripts – had been completely transformed by AI, she noted."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
